This morning Apple finally announced availability of its first Thunderbolt cable alongside Promise's Pegasus external RAID solution. We've previewed the Pegasus in the past but today we received a shipping model of the 6-bay 12TB.

The packaging isn't quite as nice as what we're used to from Apple, but the device inside is really what matters. The R6 comes with six removable drive bays capable of accepting both 2.5" and 3.5" drives.

There are two LEDs per drive bay as well as power and Thunderbolt LEDs on the left side of the device:

The Pegasus is audible thanks to its six hard drives and two fans, but it's not what I'd consider loud.

Promise is announcing availability of four different configurations of the Pegasus available via Apple's online store:

Promise Pegasus Lineup

# of Bays

Drive Configuration

Default Capacity

Price

Promise Pegasus R4 4TB

4

4 x 1TB RAID-5

2.7TB

$999

Promise Pegasus R4 8TB

4

4 x 2TB RAID-5

5.7TB

$1499

Promise Pegasus R6 6TB

6

6 x 1TB RAID-5

4.7TB

$1499

Promise Pegasus R6 12TB

6

6 x 2TB RAID-5

9.7TB

$1999

All of the available Pegasus systems ship with 7200RPM 3.5" hard drives, although Promise mentioned that we will may see SSD enabled configurations in the future. The 12TB R6 we received uses six Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB drives (HDS723020BLA642) in a 9.7TB RAID-5 configuration. The 7K3000 spins its four platters at 7200RPM and buffers data with a 64MB on-board cache. The drive has a 6Gbps SATA interface although the Pegasus R4/R6 supports SAS drives as well. All of the Pegasus devices ship in RAID 5 however they do support RAID-0/1/5/50/6/10.

Suprised Apple partnered with Promise... they don't exactly have a stellar reputation for quality or performance. I still fondly recall the Athlon XP days where glitchy Promise raid controllers with terrible drivers were eating people's data for breakfast.Reply

How is this an Apple partnership?Neither making Mac peripherals nor having your hardware sold in Apple stores require "partnerships", unless you plan to weaken the term so much that it is meaningless.Reply